Author: grid

This weekend is MONDO! (The coolest juggling festival this side of the Midwest.) Some might argue that claim, but I always enjoy the festival. Plus, I’ve helped run the thing for the past 5 years or so, so I have to say that, or they kick me off the planning committee.

Not that I’ve done anything for it this year other than fold the fliers one night at neverthriving. I’m not very active in the group, but I do try and go to the meetings and stuff. This year promises to be a good festival– then again, they’re all pretty good festivals. I haven’t been to a juggling convention all year, I don’t think, and I’m starting to really look forward to this one.

Also amazingly crazy: My last day at my job is tomorrow. I packed up a bunch of my books and stuff already, but I’m still going to have a box of stuff when I leave. It will also (strangely) be a little sad to say goodbye to the box that I’m writing this on right now. This mac has been my work machine for… well, I was going to say three years now, but then I realized that I swapped it out for a newer one only a few months ago. Damn. I guess I can’t get that nostalgic about it then, can I?

I will most likely do most of my work on a PC at the new place. I’ll have my little laptop if I need my fix of OSX, but it is slow as hell, (especially running mozilla), and I’ve been thinking about upgrades for a while now. If only apple computers weren’t so damn expensive I’d have probably bought a new G5 a while ago now.

Anyway, MONDO… this weekend… yeah.

I am occasionally so politically moved that I want to DO something. I feel incensed to riot, or protest, yet some other (more) rational side of me feels the pointlessness of protests and riots, and so instead I sit, day after day, and work, or play games, or just LIVE instead of looking for something to DO.

I do not want my life to be dominated by these moments. I despise the fact that suitably horrific world events and circumstances exist to move me in this way, but am (without devoting me life in some way to abolishing them) relatively unequipped to deal with these circumstances, and thus feel justified in doing nothing.

This is, of course, a defeatist attitude, and no way to go about exacting any change whatsoever. In a small way, these posts on politics and my opinions are a way for me to somehow do penance for the moments when I feel I must DO something to change the world.

This morning I had one of those moments after reading an article at the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) entitled Do Turkeys enjoy Thanksgiving? I gather this article was actually some kind of presentation at the World Social Forum, which I had never even heard of before reading the article.

I have decided to paste the entire contents of the article into my “extended entry” below, mostly because–at least for me–their website is really slow. I encourage everyone to click “more” and read it.
Continue reading “global Imperialism”

I’m taking this post to link the new blog of my old friend delobius. We met back in the day at the UofMN, where we slacked off together in my first (and only) C programming course.

This morning I wrote this huge response to his post asking about whether lies are black and white or shades of grey, and debated posting my response here instead of in his comments. So now that I’ve written another huge response to his latest post on political discourse, I decided to post it here instead. Anyway, he’s a great guy, political disagreements aside.

I agreed with almost everything in the post initially. Name calling in politics is pretty much pointless, and about as likely to convince someone of your point as it is to enrage them beyond the point of rational discussion… But I do NOT agree with the premise that Bush is obviously not a terrorist.

Dictionary.com defines terrorism as:

The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Bush is clearly using force and violence to coerce foreign governments for ideological or political reasons. (Does destroying them completely count?) He’s changed his tune a couple of times about why we invaded Iraq, but whether it’s ideological or political, I think we’ve got it covered there. (Of course, giving him complete credit for these actions is probably unwise, but lets take that in stride for the sake of this argument.) That leaves only one question…

Did he break any laws to do it?

If he hasn’t broken any laws… he’s not a terrorist by dictionary definition, he’s just an asshole with too much power.

I’m not up on my global treaty knowledge. (But a quick google search reveals at least one page on laws that were perhaps broken by invading Afghanistan.) As far as I know our “war on Iraq” has circumnavigated (if not overtly broken) international peace treaties and/or accords. If these treaties can be considered “law” then we’ve got ourselves terrorist actions performed by our government…

If not, well, we’ve still got the term “asshole” to fall back on.

So yesterday we visited the commercial circus that is the ice palace. Not one, but two giant wall-sized TVs blast commercials at you with the sound echoing over megaphones as you walk in. I felt like I was in some science fiction dystopia ala Minority Report or something. I mean, here we are in negative degree weather, and they’re showing Campbell’s soup commercials on a giant TV that is literally so big that you can’t look at the ice palace without seeing it.

I honestly recommend you NOT go. Or at least, don’t bother going inside. There are a couple of neat ice sculptures, and a giant garish purple column spouting a two-foot flame from the top of it, but otherwise, there’s nothing inside you can’t see from outside. And if you want to go ice-skating, do it at a local park… the rink size will be the same, and you won’t have 50 other people trying to squeeze onto it simultaneously.

They do a light show that is perfectly visible from across the street in pretty much any direction. It’s nothing special, and in my opinion definitely not worth the $5 admission.

I was so upset about the commercials that I could have left after about a minute, (not to mention the fact that it was uber-cold) but Laura wanted to finish up her roll of film, so we stuck around long enough to get some pictures here and there. I took a bunch with my cameraphone, but only a few turned out decently.

We went home to warm up and Laura cooked a hot yummy dinner of breaded Quorn (faux-chicken) patties cooked in Campbell’s tomato soup. We both had a good laugh about the irony.

This morning as I left for work everything was covered in probably six inches of snow. About a mile down the freeway, everybody stopped, and we were stop and go for another mile. In that time, I started taking pictures with my cameraphone, mostly of just random shit, until we finally started moving again, about the time the freeway split down to two lanes, because there was a two-semi, two-car pileup covering the leftmost two lanes. Of course, I didn’t even think to get any good pictures!

Then, having finally accelerated to 55 for the first time that morning, and as I was cursing myself for not taking any pictures of the accident, four dump truck snowplows entered the freeway literally one car ahead of me. They spread quickly to cover the entire freeway, dumping sand and/or salt behind them as they went. I was stuck behind these giant orange beasts almost my entire ride down 394. I didn’t mind so much though, as I decided I would be able to redeem my earlier photographic failure by taking pictures of the plows!

First, I had to maneuver around the car in front of me. No point having him in the shot. Once that was taken care of, I whipped out the camera, and BLAM-O! –out of memory error! I scrambled to erase a few of the stupid random pictures I’d taken earlier, and snapped a couple of quickies before I had to exit the freeway–all this while driving dangerously close to the four giant snowplow-behemoths.

I wish I’d thought to empty my camera last night after we got back from the ice palace. I’d have gotten some pictures while the dump trucks simultaneously raised their rear dumper thingies… I think they had to periodically do that in order to get the salt to the back of the truck. Anyway, it was a sight to behold. But you’ll have to take my word for it.

So today jasonj forwarded me an interesting article on how juggling is good for your brain. It’s crazy stuff, that greymatter.

“Human brains probably must be viewed as dynamic, changing with development and normal learning.” ~ Arne May, of the University of Regensburg in Germany

This got me thinking about the concept of our dynamic brains, and wondering about Einstein’s brain. I mean, was it all misshapen when he was born? Or did it change as he spent years thinking about math and science all the time?

I wonder about what parts of my brain are over (or under) developed?

Of course, the email’s subject was “we’re smarter”, and DrBombay posted about how we’ll soon take over the world. This reminded me of last night when I was wondering when they’ll release seasons of the Animaniacs on DVD so I can watch all the episodes of Pinky and the Brain. (I love that show!)

While I’m posting interesting links… today is the birthday of poet Howard Moss, (according to the writer’s almanac). When I went searching around for him, I found this awesome poem by Erica Jong called For Howard Moss. I’ve never really liked long poems, but sometimes (very rarely) when they’re split up into shorter sections like this you can find a good one.

On the subject of interesting links… I’ve just about decided that I want to adopt a format similar to Jason kottke’s in that he has links scattered in among his posts. I don’t, however, want to use the same implementation he uses. (Follow the link for details on his convoluted homepage.) I’m not sure what the best way is yet to achieve what I want to do, but I only need two types of data intermingled, not five, so I feel that there has to be a perfectly easy way to do it. In fact, an idea just came to me that involves using an entry’s “category” to select a CSS style that controls formatting of the post… hmm. Maybe I’ll work on that soon!

So I’m excited to blab about this–now that it’s all official and stuff–I start a new job in 2 weeks! It’s going to be great. I’m super excited.

I put my letter of resignation (cowardly according to Jason) on my bosses desk before I left last night, along with sending an email to everyone I work with. The response has been surprisingly positive. (As in, “good luck!” and “best wishes” rather than “good riddance”.) For instance, I just had an extremely satisfying conversation with my boss, who I don’t really deal with on any sort of regular basis, but who I gather has some amount of respect for me and the work I do.

Last night we had an impromptu party in celebration. Tom brought the booze, (which only he, laura and I really consumed). Then we fixed the other Tom’s laptop (installed some drivers for his new keychain-drive) before playing a round of Guillotine, which I felt was a blast.

I think there will be an official party in the works… probably on Friday the 13th! (Black cats and all!)

This morning has been a slow recovery from last night’s foray into none other than *trumpets sounding*: Talisman! The game drBombay has been trying so desperately to find and play. At juggling last night, Travis (who hadn’t been there in awhile) revealed that he had a copy of talisman at his place that he’d never even played.

We set it up on the round table in our kitchen, and Laura, DrBombay, his friend Rick, Travis and I spent a couple of hours playing it, despite a missing deck of spell cards. (Somehow, Travis’s copy had an extra minotaur figurine instead.) I took a picture, so you can see at least a bit of the glory that was had.

This version of the game was the 3rd edition, and DrBombay has been working pretty exclusively at getting a copy of the 2nd, as he has fond memories of it, and has apparently heard from various sources that they screwed it up with the last release. The lack of spell cards did detract quite a bit from the game, but I think we all had a pretty good time anyway.

When Travis finally won, I felt that it was pretty abrupt. If he hadn’t had a one-time +7 to his attack, the game might easily have continued for another hour into the night. I kind of feel like you should have to beat all the other players rather than just the dragon king. I guess all the expansion packs change the goals of the game in various ways, so maybe it wouldn’t feel quite as jarring when you play with them.

Travis, it turns out, has an extensive collection of the types of game that we’ve all been so excited by lately. We were going to play Killer Bunnies, but after two hours of Talisman, I think everyone wanted to call it a night. Hopefully there will be more gaming excitement soon!

Link discovery of the morning: http://bookcrossing.com/. Across between geocaching and the library, this site deserves some exploration. I’m debating releasing a book into the wild myself!

Why is it that I can’t seem to close any given browser window (complete with 5 to 10 open tabs) without finding at least three more links I want to follow before I do? I was in the process of trying to shut down mozilla (so I could upgrade from 1.6b to 1.6) when I stumbled into this really cool list of movies that made various 2003 top 10 lists. (link via kottke.org) There are a few more movies that I want to see now as a result. (And Lost in Translation has moved even higher on my “must see” list.)

I was surprised to finish reading this quote and find out who it was from. I agree wholeheartedly. My opinion is that capitalism is not evil in and of itself (I do actually question the concept of “evil”), but I think great wealth nurtures an “above the law” feeling. Strangely, poverty also leads to lawlessness… often out of desperation. I wonder if the phrase “below the law” is inappropriate.

I’m just thinking out loud here. Anyway, read the quote:

“In today’s world, it is not enough to limit oneself to the law of the
market, one must avoid the evils that stem from capitalism, which put
profit above the person and make [the latter] the victim of so many
injustices. Those who always suffer most in the crises are the poor.
This is why they must be the special object of the vigilance and
attention of the state. At the root of peoples’ social, economic and
political ills is usually the rejection or neglect of real ethical,
spiritual and transcendental values, it must not be forgotten that
the common good is the objective to attain.”

– Pope John Paul II, Vatican City, Dec. 15, 2003